Posted by Tim Cratchit on June 02, 2002 at 12:17:57:
In Reply to: HELP! I need some George Orwell experts ASAP! posted by Salvador Pineda on June 02, 2002 at 10:10:22:
If I was you, I would fake some benign stuff: It does not always pay to be honest with your teacher, especialy when you are asked to write about your soft underbelly. Don't even tell your girlfriend about your weakness: one day she could use in a way that you might not like.
What is evil and what you would/would not die for are general moralist questions that are worthless (except for writing a shool paper). Often you can tell, when you have to make the choice - if you are lucky enough to have the choice - but it depends very much. If you bother to think about anything, you will find out that you cannot get by with one simple definition,
You can look at [http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/] and read there "Revenge is sour" "War guilt" "Interview with Pacifist" and "Robot Bombs" from Orwell, these are short columns, related to the subject, but there won't be any general definition like you were asked to produce.
Also, Orwell did not shoot a fasist soldier in Spain, that was running away and holding his pants: O. felt it would be bad thing to do, even though he was there to fight fasists.
If you read 1984, you would see that Winston was not in fact a very nice person, his motives (and those of Julia) were primarily selfish. They did it because they hated the party and their secret love revolt made them to feel more normal, even happy for a brief moment.
Perhaps you can tell quite few examples of evil stuff or describe circumstances when you would volunteer to risk your life etc. but life is more complicated than a military conduct code or dopey teacher would make you believe.